


Sesen ( The Lotus )

by cassiexrailly



Category: Into the Ashes (2019), Nikita (TV 2010)
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-21
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:48:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26573239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassiexrailly/pseuds/cassiexrailly
Summary: Nick Brenner is running from his past with all of his old partners' money. Cara Parson is running from hers, too. Running back home. It just might be darker and more sinister than his. But can they find peace in the future when the past they're both running from isn't too far behind? Maybe they can. Maybe...together. But they're gonna have to fight for it because the past can only be paid in blood.
Relationships: Cara Parson/Nick Brenner, Nick Brenner/Cara Parson, Nick Brenner/OC, OC/Nick Brenner
Kudos: 2





	1. prologue

**Author's Note:**

> this is an idea i came up with when i watched into the ashes with luke grimes and robert taylor. i wondered what it would have been like if his wife hadn't been all she appeared, what if she had been strong enough to survive the forced entry of her home to nick's ex-partners in crime? what if she had been an ex-Division operative like my oc Cara Mason? and so i began with the egyptian theme kind of hinted at by the tattoos featured in the movie and expanded on that because of Cara's tattoos in her primary verse as a Division survivor. in this Cara had been adopted by the sheriff and his wife (canons from the film) in the place of the blood daughter the movie had used and killed off. this is simply a taste of the relationship and the action and drama and pain that's coming. hope you all bear with me and enjoy it!!

Some say the land of men was always a godless and evil place. In this story, you might come to believe as I chose to quite a few years ago…

When the earth was new, made with mud and water and reeds and sticks, he fell in love with the sky. She was unattainable for him; she would never be tamed, would never lay down with him and stay. But he loved her freedom and her vastness, her light and her darkness and every moment set between them. They rose together every morning and fell down together every night, basked in moon glow and the still promise of possibility. She came to love his landscape, the way he basked in her presence and craved her very existence. When they finally consummated their near constant dance of night and day, it was no surprise the five children they created were as disparate and opposed as the two lovers that made them.

Osiris was the oldest and wisest and he took his sister, Isis, for his wife, queen, and consort. They were the two most alike, aligned in their love for the mortals created in their image, and fulfilled by the need for their existence to be one of service and the dominion of good over evil. They ruled with stable, strong, but open arms. Right and good were the rule of law and every life was of value. The two gave the people laws, culture, a religious instruction, and agriculture, building a society from savagery. Egypt became a paradise under their tutelage and care.

As with all tales of success and prosperity, it wasn’t long before jealousy and envy got the best of their brother Set. The seeds of the green-eyed monsters sewed themselves so fully in Set that he soon resolved to kill his brother, Osiris, and take all for himself. The first attempt, born of weakness and reeking of desperation, saw Osiris sealed in a sarcophagus made specifically to his size and carried down the Nile until a great tamarisk tree stopped it and grew quickly around it in protection. Meanwhile, Isis wandered the lands in search of her beloved, finding him inside a palace in Byblos encased in the same tree, as an ornamental pillar in the stately home. In exchange for the inhabitants’ lives, she was blessed with Osiris body, which she hid among the reeds of the Nile until she might bring him back to life. Set, learning of his brother’s body having been found, and knowing Isis would waste no time in bringing him back to life, found his brother and cut him into many pieces, casting them into the Nile and across the lands of Egypt. Upon Isis’ return, she learned what Set had done from her sister and Set’s lover Nephthys.

The most important part of this tale wasn’t the continued persecution of two good deities and rulers by the evil and the backbiting of those who should have valued them and loved them over anyone else. Instead, the lengths Isis went to get her husband’s body back, to then recover the parts of his body that had been strewn across the lands of Egypt, and to bring him back from the death with her power of eternal love and light. It is a story of rebirth through love.

Death can be undone. Love…cannot.

I once thought I was nothing like Isis. She was everything good I could never be. Sure, I was strong, and I was powerful; but with everything I’d been through, I hadn’t gotten a chance to know the romantic love of two people like those two gods had.

Not until I went home to Bessemer, Alabama.

Not until I met and fell in love with Nick Brenner…


	2. one

His heart was pounding in his ears. It was all he could do to keep his eyes open and his hands on the wheel, his foot on the gas. The pain was excruciating. He’d been keeping his shoulder high, pressing his right arm tight to his body to keep the pressure on the wound but the large gash that Sloan had given him wept profusely. The towels against his chest and wedged between his arm and side to keep them in place, stuffed into his armpit…they were nearly soaked through.

The staples had only been a stop-gap measure until he could seek more professional medical attention. But he was a criminal on the run from other criminals, his former partners; there was no safe professional medical attention. The most he had been hoping for was a veterinarian that left the back door propped open in a small town on a breezy summer night. Not a one had he found, and he’d been driving through states on highways and even some backroads, for days now. He only stopped at a hotel or motel for one night and he left just as early the next morning so as to not draw undue attention. He’d come all the way from Brooklyn, New York. But that had never been home; no, home had always been Alabama. He saw that now, as he was bleeding out all over himself. The blood ran in little rivers down him sometimes and there was a growing little pool in the footwell of his driver’s seat.

He remembered what his father had said when he’d left home at such a young age. His old man was an old drunk fool, but he very rarely ever came to blows with himself or his mother. His father had told the kid he’d been at the time that ‘ _the grass was never any greener on the other side of your fence where your neighbor lives_ ’ and that ‘ _if you were so ready and willing to believe that_ ’ then he was ‘ _no son of mine_ ’ and he should ‘ _never bother coming home again_.’ If the pain hadn’t been bad enough that he had to grind his back molars together to keep from crying out and succumbing to it, he would have laughed at the irony.

‘Well, dad, I’m home.’

And what would the old man do when he saw him again? Nothing. His father had been dead for seven years and dead to him, for much longer. Short of shooting his hand up out of his grave to give his son a middle finger salute, there wasn’t much more than rolling over in it that Arthur Brenner could do. He certainly couldn’t make his son’s life any worse than it was this very moment.

His breath hitched as the pain bit into his sternum and went deep with every inhale. Yeah, he was done for if he couldn’t get this wound closed again… He was as close to death as he’d ever been since he got clear of Sloan and Charlie. A good old-fashioned hospital was going to have to do. They would ask questions he'd never be able to answer truthfully, honestly, or believably. It was just the kind of risk he’d have to live with…if he lived.

The lights blurred as he drove a bit harder to get into the city limits of his old hometown before he stopped at a hospital. He didn’t want to go to just any one; he wanted to be home. He wanted to be in a place that had known him, once upon a time, even if it had been many, many years. He was pushing the boundaries of his own composure, of his own will, fighting to stay alert and awake to simply make it. A yellow light turned red too quickly and he mashed the long slender pedal down to the floor, jumping through the intersection and causing two Cadillacs to scream in crescendo obscenity after him. His vision swam even more, the edges of everything he could see in detail some time ago, softening and blending into the background.

Medical West was only a half mile ahead. If he could make it there he might make it. He might live. He might have a chance to start over here. He’d called Jordan on a burner phone before making the trip. His dad had known Jordan. If he was going to stop running somewhere the least expected place would be where he’d come from so long ago. He swung right, hard, into the drive for the emergency entrance. His hands and arms were starting to shake slightly, cold, bloodless, dying, and still, he found the will, the strength, to kick the door open and pull himself out of his car by his good arm, still holding the right close, damage done regardless of his intent.

The was an older woman at the desk and as he careened in like some derelict, drunk or worse, but obviously hurt, she didn’t even look up. He found his voice, having to spit the words out through his teeth to manage them through the pain. “I need…a doctor. Surgeon. Is there…anyone available?”

The old bitty at the desk was painting her nails. She still didn’t look up. The smell of blood, salt and minerals and copper and iron, filled the waiting area where he stood and she never even looked at him. She never assessed the patient. “You’ll have to fill out these documents.” She used the hand she didn’t have wet paint on yet to hand him a clipboard with five sheets on it. “Take a seat and wait just like everybody else, sonny.”

“I’m…gonna fucking…bleed out…” He managed again, through chattered, clenched teeth. “Please help me… I don’t have…the time…”

Again, her eyes never left her hands, the desk, and her bottle of obscenely young red fingernail paint. “You think everyone else in this waiting room is beneath you? It’s the emergency room, sonny, you’re all emergencies! Sit. Down. I’ll call you when it’s your turn!”

And this bitch was a **_nurse_**!?

Maybe dying would have been better than to come back here…

An hour later he saw with his shirt, his jeans, and his hands bathed and soaked in his crimson life source. His eyes were glassy and far away as he’d fallen into some sort of stupor while he’d been forced to wait… To wait for his life. He was only mildly aware of his surroundings at that point. It was ironic, the one thing that caught his attention was…a glimpse of a neon green poison colored thong and porcelain ass cheek as a sexy petite body with curves but hard planes and muscular in all the right ways passed him by with only a passing glance. The skirt she was wearing was far too short for a small Alabama town where the minds were smaller and narrower. He tried to grunt but all he managed was a wheezy cough that sputtered some more blood out of the wound, soaking into the already soaked to the max towel.

Words were muffled as the pretty young thing, who couldn’t be more than his age, if not a bit younger, and the old bitch at the desk exchanged for a moment. It seemed to start out civil, but quickly degraded. The voices rose. The old bitch was screaming. The young one wearing a preppy yet somehow raunchy outfit wasn’t. She didn’t have to. Her words cut like a knife and punched the old cunt back in her chair without even raising in pitch.

"Listen, **_sweetheart_** , if you don't get him in a room and allow me to help him in the next..." The little thing looked at the clock. "Minute, I am going to personally call my father, the Sheriff of the county, and I will tell him you're purposely refusing to help him based on the fact that you don't wanna get off your sorry fucking ass and actually do some work instead of painting your nails a shade of red that's far too fucking young for your wrinkly hands. And if he passes out or dies of blood loss in between the time you leave here in cuffs and I actually get to help him; you'll be up for murder. Pre-meditated. Because you let him sit here like a fucking derelict for...how long? An hour? More?" He could see her pale eyes now as she turned to look his way and then turned back, narrowing them from what he could tell. "Get him. A fucking. Room. Now!" She paused for added effect. "Please, darlin'..."

He would have smiled if he’d had the strength. She was a spitfire, a firecracker, no. That wasn’t right. She burned hotter and stronger than anything he’d ever seen in his whole life lit on fire. She was more consuming than anything, anyone, he’d ever met before. Hell, if he’d met her before he’d left town…he might have never left and got into this mess. He would have never met Sloan or Charlie. She was a thousand times more alluring than their little family had been to him. She was the wildfire and he was all the moths in the field…

"Hey..." She said softly, her blood red nails painted with a color so deep and rich it looked as though he’d bled all over them, on a porcelain hand, touched his jeans clad leg.

When had she gotten there beside him? He must have been blacking out periodically, now.

"Hey darlin'... You okay enough to stand for me, baby?" She's crouching by him now, one knee on the tile flooring. The flouncy little skirt she wore was barely to her knees when she crouching down or on her knees like that. It was much shorter when she was standing and moving. Her heels struck him as strange for this small town, too. She either wasn’t from around here, or she had been gone for a very long time, too. She was a dream, he thought, even now as her words reached out to him. "I'm gonna help you, but you gotta follow me into the other room. Okay?"

He smiled. He felt himself do that. He could manage to do that and know he was doing it. At least he had that much left. “Y-yeah… I think…I can…” He’d been holding on for a long time. What was a few more moments? What wouldn’t he do…to spend whatever time he had left…with her. “Are you a nurse?” He asked feebly, his lower lip wibbling and shaking of its own volition. Weak.

She stood now, the skirt flouncing and bouncing momentarily with the action, her tight form fitting tank top with sheer mesh back showed her medium sized titty cleavage through its deep plunging v-neckline and her periwinkle blue bra through the perspicuous backing. "Something like that, baby..."

He barely got to his feet and he probably wouldn’t have made it if she hadn’t been there for support. He swayed and she caught him. She was strong for a little thing, fully able to support his weight and then some. He tried very hard not to put too much on her but it soon became apparent he couldn’t help it. He stumbled and swayed as his legs felt like Jell-O and he nearly fell into the desk where the old woman glared at him. His good arm was around her and he it only took a moment for his weight to disappear from his own feet. She was practically carrying him! Well, his feet were shuffling forward for himself but it was more like the training wheels on the baby bicycle when the kid was already well verses in riding two-wheel. Unnecessary.

“My name is Cara. What can I call you, baby?”

Her voice was like honey. An angel’s song in another realm. Her porcelain skin was covered in places with tattoos. By what he could see he knew it wouldn’t be limited to the skin she was showing; this one loved to cover her body in the things she wanted to keep with her until she had run her last stretch of gravel road. Damn. He couldn’t even enjoy them like he wanted because she was getting his blood all over her… He blinked, once, twice, three times, trying to clear his view before answering. His darker amber brown eyes locked with her pale grey blues and he cleared his throat a bit.

“It’s Nick… I’m Nick…Brenner.”

“Well, Nick, you’re gonna be okay. I’ve got you. You can give it all to me now, okay? Let me worry about this… You just close those eyes and rest. I’ve got you, now.”

_I’ve got you now…_


End file.
